Trump & AG Jefferson Beauregard Sessions expected to lift ban on military gear to local pig gestapos
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/08/27/trump-expected-lift-ban-military-gear-local-police-forces/606065001/
Trump expected to lift ban on military gear to local police forces
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration Monday lifted a controversial ban on the transfer of some surplus military equipment to police departments whose battlefield-style response to rioting in a St. Louis suburb three years ago prompted a halt to the program.
The new plan takes effect immediately and fully rolls back an Obama administration executive order that blocked armored vehicles, large-caliber weapons, ammunition and other heavy equipment from being re-purposed from foreign battlefields to America's streets.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who led the campaign for the program's reinstatement, outlined the President Trump's new executive order Monday in an address at the annual meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest police union.
The administration's action, first disclosed by USA TODAY, would restore "the full scope of a longstanding program for recycling surplus, lifesaving gear from the Department of Defense, along with restoring the full scope of grants used to purchase this type of equipment from other sources,'' according to a administration summary of the new program recently circulated to some law enforcement groups.
"Assets that would otherwise be scrapped can be re-purposed to help state, local and tribal law enforcement better protect public safety and reduce crime."
The FOP and some other law enforcement groups have long been pressing for a reversal of the Obama administration policy, arguing that access to such equipment was needed, especially in cash-strapped communities, to better respond to local unrest.
Civil rights advocates, however, warned that the program's reinstatement threatened to inflame tensions in minority communities where such equipment has been deployed in the past.
"It is both exceptionally dangerous and irresponsible for the administration to lift the ban on the transfer of certain surplus military equipment to state and local law enforcement organizations,'' said Janai Nelson, associate director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "Just a few summers ago, our nation watched as Ferguson raised the specter of increased police militarization. The law enforcement response there and in too many places across the country demonstrated how perilous, especially for black and brown communities, a militarized police force can be.''
Nelson said the timing of the president's decision, against the backdrop of unrest in Charlottesville, Va., "reflects this administrations now open effort to escalate racial tensions in our country.''
Local access to the high-powered gear was put on national display in 2014 in Ferguson, Mo., where armored vehicles and heavily-armed police clashed with protesters for days following the police shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old black man by a white officer.
The deployment of such equipment, President Obama argued at the time, cast the police as an "occupying force,'' deepening a divide between law enforcement and a wary community.
"We've seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like they're an occupying force, as opposed to a force that's part of the community that's protecting them and serving them," Obama said in announcing the ban in 2015.
The military gear ban was among a host of policing reform recommendations to flow from a White House advisory group formed in the aftermath of the Ferguson rioting.
The Task Force on 21st Century Policing, chaired by former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and Laurie Robinson, a former assistant attorney general, called on law enforcement officials to "minimize the appearance of a military operation'' when policing mass demonstrations.
"Avoid using provocative tactics and equipment that undermine civilian trust," the task force urged.
The previously-banned equipment also included tracked armored vehicles, bayonets and grenade launchers.
The Obama order did allow for the limited use of other surplus — aircraft, wheeled tactical vehicles, mobile command units, battering rams and riot gear — on the condition that such equipment was approved by the federal government.
The surplus sharing agreement, also known as the "1033 program," was created by Congress nearly 30 years ago as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. It was originally intended to assist local law enforcement in drug investigations.
The program was expanded in 1997 to include all local law enforcement operations, including counter-terrorism. Since then, according to the government, more than $5 billion in gear has been transferred to state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies.
"Much of the equipment provided through the 1033 program is entirely defensive in nature ... that protect officers in active shooter scenarios and other dangerous situations," the Trump administration proposal says.
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@stringer bell have you ever thought about starting your own black news site? Because the majority of the black news I read about comes from you lol
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ghostdog56 wrote: »@stringer bell have you ever thought about starting your own black news site? Because the majority of the black news I read about comes from you lol
Anyone can start a youtube channel. I hear monetizing is ? these days, though.
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You know they wont use it against nazis or the ?
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/27/us/politics/trump-law-order-police-arpaio.htmlTrump’s Brand of Law and Order Leaves Leeway on the Law
President Trump spent 18 months as the ultimate law-and-order candidate, promising to rescue an American way of life he said was threatened by terrorists, illegal immigrants and inner-city criminals.
But during seven months as president, many critics and legal scholars say, Mr. Trump has shown a flexible view on the issue, one that favors the police and his own allies over strict application of the rule of law.
Over the past two years, in ways big and small, the critics say, Mr. Trump has signaled that taking the law into one’s own hands is permissible, within the executive branch or in local police departments, or even against a heckler at one of his rallies.
The president’s pardon last week of Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., and a strong supporter of Mr. Trump’s during the 2016 campaign, illuminated the impulses that shape his opinion.
The case, and the pardon that ended it, involved an assumption that minorities were more likely to commit crimes, a belief in the use of force to keep people in check, and what some of the president’s advisers privately describe as at best a lack of interest in becoming fluent in the legal process.
At a rally in Phoenix last week, where Mr. Trump signaled that a pardon was coming, the president said that Mr. Arpaio, who repeatedly engaged in racial profiling as he defied a court order, had been convicted simply for doing his job.
In his words and acts, critics and experts said, Mr. Trump has sent a permissive message to people in law enforcement that they can bend the law, if not break it.
“Arpaio is a public official accused of racial profiling, and in the pardon statement, he was praised for his actions,” said Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
Mr. Waldman drew a line from the pardon to Mr. Trump’s statements last month to police officers on Long Island in which he appeared to encourage local law enforcement officials to give suspects rougher treatment. The president made those comments despite years of wrenching debate over a string of cases of police shootings of unarmed black men.
“When the president says, ‘Make sure to hit the heads of people on the door of the police car,’ or pardons a sheriff accused of racial profiling, it redefines the law as just brute force,” Mr. Waldman said.
Officials in the executive branch and in individual agencies have started to speak out with increasing, and surprising, frequency. A senior Justice Department official wrote a memo after Mr. Trump’s Long Island speech, stating strongly that the agency does not condone brutality. So did several police departments across the country.
Mr. Trump, who spent his early adult years in the crime-ravaged, racially volatile crucible of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, sees life through the prism of strength versus weakness. On Twitter, as Hurricane Harvey ravaged Texas, Mr. Trump said he had unleashed the force of federal aid. On Sunday morning, as the rains continued, the president tweeted an endorsement of a book by another hard-line law enforcement official accused of civil rights violations: Sheriff David A. Clarke of Milwaukee County, Wis., whom he called “a great guy.”
While Mr. Trump has spoken often of the significance of the rule of law, his actions have raised questions about his commitment to hallmarks of the American system like due process, equal protection under the law, independence of judicial proceedings from political considerations, and respect for orders from the courts.
“I don’t think you have to be a champion of it; all you need to do is comply with it,” said Charles Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who was a solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan.
“And he shows himself absolutely unwilling to respect it,” Mr. Fried said, citing the pardon as a particular thumb in the eye of a judge. “It’s a use of authority specifically to undermine the only weapon that a judge has in this kind of ultimate confrontation.”
The White House declined to address the criticisms on the record, but one official said the president’s actions on immigration enforcement, in particular, had re-established the rule of law instead of ignoring it, lifted the morale of the police, and restored the focus on combating illegal immigration to states instead of the federal government.
As a candidate, Mr. Trump enthusiastically endorsed a brutal interrogation technique declared illegal under international law. “Torture works,” Mr. Trump said at a South Carolina event in early 2016, a statement he tried to modify when some of his outside advisers threatened to leave his campaign.
When protests erupted at his rallies, he repeatedly waxed nostalgic about the “good old days” when people could take such matters into their own hands. He endorsed stop-and-frisk policing, and said immigration by Muslims should be banned to protect Americans’ safety. He argued to Bill O’Reilly, then a Fox News host, that immigrants in the country illegally may not be entitled to due process at all.
On the same program, Mr. Trump insisted, despite established law, that the 14th Amendment does not guarantee citizenship to people born in the United States if their parents are here illegally.
After proposing a wall along the southern border, he repeatedly attacked a federal judge of Mexican descent who was overseeing a case involving Mr. Trump’s private company. A “so-called judge,” he called him.
“Those were rhetorical excesses. This is a use of power to disarm and make empty the actions of a judge,” Mr. Fried said. “You come with a certain level of constitutional literacy, and he is totally illiterate in these domains. You think every day it can’t get worse, and then it does.”
More recently, Mr. Trump described himself as “liberating” towns from the scourge of gangs of undocumented immigrants. He has expressed anger with the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, one of his earliest supporters, for agreeing to take the job when he knew he might recuse himself from inquiries related to possible collusion between Russian officials and the Trump campaign. And he asked Mr. Sessions in the spring if the federal charges could be dropped against Mr. Arpaio, and was promptly told no.
“You get the sense that this is kind of New York wheeler-dealer territory, where you say whatever pops in your mouth to get through the negotiation,” Mr. Waldman said. -
Robert Bauer, who was White House counsel under President Barack Obama, said: “It’s very difficult to say that he stands for law and order — in fact, in many respects he’s kind of the president of disorder. He’s lurching around and basically responding to what he sees as his personal or legal imperative at any given moment.”
The historian Douglas Brinkley recalled dining with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago in late 2016, after the election, and hearing the president-elect describe dining privately with Richard M. Nixon in New York after his presidency had ended.
“In his mind, a tough president was Nixon,” Mr. Brinkley said. “He creates a kind of fantasy world, and so he wants to be seen as one of the tough guys.”
The pardon, the conservative Washington Examiner said in an editorial, showed “once again Trump really means ‘busting heads’ when he says ‘law and order.’”
The editorial added: “But ‘law and order,’ if the words have any meaning, has to apply to government actors as well. Lawless sheriffs promote disorder, and that’s what Arpaio did to get himself convicted.”
Mr. Arpaio said in an interview on Sunday that Mr. Trump’s experience with the judiciary as it ruled against his travel ban targeting Muslim nations had led him to be suspicious of the motives of some judges.
“He understands that some courts are biased,” Mr. Arpaio said. “I can confirm that with my situation, believe me.”
Mr. Arpaio said his pardon merely showed Mr. Trump’s faith in the prerogatives of police officers. “He’s not using me to show he’s tough,” Mr. Arpaio said. “He is enforcing the rule of law.”
“I really believe in his heart that he likes what I did and he believes I got the raw deal,” he said.
On Sunday, on Fox News, the secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, was asked whether the president spoke for American values. Mr. Tillerson demurred.
“The president speaks for himself,” Mr. Tillerson said. -
Dead Prez: We living in a Police State. Gonna be the best job to have in a few years. Shame too.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justice-department-ends-program-scrutinizing-local-police-forces/2017/09/15/ee88d02e-9a3d-11e7-82e4-f1076f6d6152_story.html?utm_term=.ce70ac775253Justice Department ends program scrutinizing local police forces
An arm of the Justice Department said Friday it would roll back Obama-era efforts to investigate local police departments and issue public reports about their failings — another way in which the Trump administration is trying to adopt a tough pro-police stance.
The changes were announced by the department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, which is halting a years-long effort begun in the previous administration to investigate and publicize the shortcomings of police departments.
Within the Justice Department, the civil rights division has for decades conducted “pattern or practice’’ probes of troubled police departments to determine whether there are systemic problems that require a court-appointed monitor to correct. In recent years, however, the COPS office had gradually expanded to do something similar, issuing public reports about problems it found in individual departments.
On Friday, the Justice Department signaled that it will leave such work to the civil rights division and that the COPS office would return to its roots — advising police departments on best practices, offering training and becoming more collaborative.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the move “a course correction to ensure that resources go to agencies that require assistance rather than expensive wide-ranging investigative assessments that go beyond the scope of technical assistance and support.”
Sessions has said he aims to put the Justice Department on a more pro-police footing. Last month, he reversed an Obama administration move to restrict shipments of military surplus gear to police departments, saying in a speech that “the previous administration was more concerned about the image of law enforcement being too ‘militarized’ than they were about our safety.”
The attorney general has also argued against actions that hurt police officers’ morale. “We cannot let the politicians, as they sometimes do, run down police and communities that are suffering, only to see crime spike in those communities,” he said this summer.
Vanita Gupta, the former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division who now works as president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said the decision is “another indication of the full retreat from police reform by Jeff Sessions.’’
The collaborative effort, Gupta said, “had buy-in from a lot of police chiefs’’ because it was a less intrusive process than a pattern or practice probe.
Proponents of the Obama administration’s approach had argued that some departments have problems that can be fixed without the intervention of court orders and that the COPS office played a valuable role in finding such problems and recommending solutions.
Under the new model, the COPS office would not conduct the kind of investigation or issue the kind of report it did last year in San Francisco after angry protests of fatal shootings by officers.
The decision affects about 14 police departments nationwide that had either begun receiving public reports from the COPS office or expected to receive such reports soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWkWVIrChWw
